He pointed toward the street.
“Another matter is walking through the city. When I first arrived here I would walk a block or two and then turn around and walk back. It had been so long since I had been able to walk long distances, that my mind would tell me to turn around. Now I walk farther, but I am still very wary, as if I’ve escaped from prison and someone may come after me or even shoot me. Walking with Lydia is curing me of that little by little.”
By this time his steak had arrived and he gazed at it as if he were looking at a beautiful woman. He started to dig in, then stopped and laughed.
“There is another problem I had briefly with the walking.” He pointed down at his shoes. “In prison I always kept any little bit of money I had or anything else small that I valued stuffed in my socks. That way even when I was sleeping no one could rob me. When I first got out, sometimes, without thinking, I would still do that with money. Then I went for a decent walk and I got a blister. Finally, I could go as far as I wanted, but I limped.”
He laughed and dug into his steak. Willie gave him time to enjoy it. Cruz asked Willie absolutely nothing about himself, although Willie sensed he was being sized up by the man across the table just as much as he was sizing up Lydia’s suitor. The gray eyes had an animal wariness to them, just as you might expect from a man who had been in a prison for years.
Willie ordered two more beers and sipped his.
“Do you have contact here in Miami with any of the men you were in prison with?”
Cruz shook his head. “No. The men I was locked up with are either dead now, or they are still stuck in that prison.”
“How was it that they let you go?”
Cruz winced slightly, as if Willie had asked something that made him uncomfortable. Willie wondered for a moment if maybe Cruz had turned into an informer in prison, maybe bought his way out by snitching on fellow inmates. That tended to happen in prisons everywhere. Cruz certainly wouldn’t want anyone to know that, although Willie wasn’t about to judge him. You had to wonder what you yourself might do after twenty years in prison. There was no way of telling. Then again, maybe that wasn’t the reason behind the discomfort. Cruz explained it moments later.
“They were trying to save money by reducing the prison population. So they chose prisoners who had caused the fewest problems. I never joined any of the protests, the hunger strikes. Some of my fellow political prisoners didn’t like that. But once I was in I just wanted to get out as quickly as I could. It still took a long, long time.” He shrugged.
Willie wondered whether Cruz did know of other former San Sebastian inmates in Miami or elsewhere, but didn’t want Willie to talk to them because they would have nothing good to say about him. That could be the source of his uneasiness.
Cruz finished his meal and Willie paid the waitress. They drifted out the door.
“Do you think we could meet again tomorrow, Mr. Cruz? There are some matters regarding the wedding I’d like to discuss with you, but right now I need to be somewhere.”
Willie hadn’t discussed the wedding at all, but that didn’t seem to surprise Cruz. They both knew what was going on: The would-be groom was being vetted. He didn’t argue.
“That will be fine with me,” Cruz said. “Why don’t we meet tomorrow around noon down where they play dominoes.”
Willie knew exactly where he meant, a roofed patio right on Eighth Street where elderly Cubans met to play the Cuban national pastime.
They shook hands. Willie started to turn away but Cruz held his hand and added a final word. “Make sure to watch your back, hombre.”
Cruz continued to grip his hand. Was this a man who had lived twenty years in a dangerous environment giving another man friendly advice? Or was Cruz issuing a not very veiled threat. Willie’s mind flashed to that shiv Norman Cruz had carried with him from San Sebastian. The other man finally let go, turned, and meandered away.
Willie went home, poured himself another beer, sat on his back porch, and stared at his backyard where the mango tree was just starting to bud. He thought about everything Norman Cruz had told him and wondered what he should do next. Halfway through that beer his next move budded as welclass="underline" He would call his mother.
Willie’s widowed mother, Silvia, was the owner of her own botanica, several blocks east on Eighth Street. It was a narrow storefront where many people — mostly Cubans — showed up with their chronic complaints. Physical, emotional, romantic, economic. You name it. Indigestion, impotence, insolvency, Silvia had a suggested remedy. She would listen at length to the problem — which was a crucial element in the service she offered — and then identify an herb that was indicated for treatment of that malady. Or she would offer the patient the image of a saint who was known to specialize in miraculously curing that condition. The likenesses she featured on her shelves were not just of Catholic saints but of spirits enshrined by the Santeria religion, which Cuban slaves had brought from Africa. She covered all her bases.
The herbs were piled in bins on one side of the store and the plaster casts of religious figures lined shelves on the other. The middle aisle separated the natural from the supernatural, like two sides of the same brain. Her customers consulted with medical doctors for serious illnesses, of course, but they brought their everyday ailments and issues to the botanica, just as they had done back in Cuba. She didn’t charge much; it was a volume business. Willie figured that over the decades almost every family in Little Havana had had dealings with his mama. Consequently, she knew everybody in the neighborhood.
She picked up the phone now, recognizing Willie’s number.
“Finally you call your mother,” she said in Spanish. “You would rather talk to criminals and other strangers than to me.”
This was her standard greeting to him. No matter how often he called it would never be enough. He apologized as he always did, told her he loved her, and then got down to business.
“Mama, who do you know who came here from San Sebastian in Cuba? I need to find someone who knows that city well.”
Silence ensued on the other end as his mother reviewed her internal Rolodex, the vast collection of names and personal stories she had accumulated over the decades. It took her the better part of a minute before she found the right name.
“You should speak with Hilda Sanchez. She came from San Sebastian decades ago, knows everybody else from there and she likes to talk.”
“Where do I find her?”
She described a large, pink, aging Art Deco apartment building just off Twenty-Seventh Avenue, still in Little Havana. Willie was familiar with it.
“You go there and ask for Hilda. Everyone knows her. I’ll call and tell her you’re coming.”
Willie thanked his mother, repeated his love for her, and disconnected. He printed out the information he had on San Sebastian and headed for Hilda’s house.
She was waiting on the steps for him when he arrived — a short, dark, silver-haired lady, about seventy. She led him to a neat second-floor apartment. Willie knew that Cuban exiles were eternally connected to the cities they came from and loved to reminisce. Exile did that to a person. For the next hour he fed Hilda questions about people, places, and events in San Sebastian over the years and listened as she luxuriated in her memories. She brought out old black-and-white snapshots of her own to illustrate her recollections and Willie studied them. At one point, in response to a question from Willie, she even picked up her cell phone and a long-distance calling card, dialed a number in San Sebastian, and put Willie on with an old friend of hers, named Amelia Martinez, who had never left.